31 In Prison Uprising Are Deported To Cuba

Thirty-one Cuban detainees were returned to Cuba on Saturday, a day after federal assault teams ended an uprising at an Alabama prison by 121 inmates trying to block the deportations.

The Cuban detainees, shackled and heavily guarded, were taken from the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution to the municipal airport in Birmingham, Ala., early in the morning and put on a plane to Cuba, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said.

Federal agents accompanied the inmates on a Justice Department jetliner, which left shortly after 10 a.m., and turned them over to the Cuban authorities in Havana, said the spokesman, Verne Jervis.

The deportations came after a tense, 10-day prison siege ended with a surprise, predawn raid on Friday by a team of 200 specially trained agents of the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Earlier in the week there were signs that the standoff might be easing, and on Wednesday night, the inmates released a 34-year-old prison secretary, one of 10 hostages they were holding.

But officials from the Justice Department and the prison said on Friday that they had decided to try the raid, which lasted only three minutes, because they believed the inmates planned to kill one or more of the nine hostages still being held.

The hostages, seven men and two women, escaped injury in the raid, but a detainee suffered minor injuries in the assault, which involved stun grenades with exploding rubber pellets. The uprising began on Aug. 21 in a cellblock of the prison, which housed 139 inmates, 121 of them Cubans and 18 Americans. Thirty-two of the inmates had been scheduled to be deported to Cuba the next day.

The inmates said they were acting in an attempt to block all deportations of Cubans.

In effect, the uprising simply delayed the deportations for 10 days. Jervis said he did not know why only 31 of the 32 inmates scheduled for deportation had boarded the plane Saturday.

The detainees were among the 125,000 Cubans who fled their homeland in the 1980 boatlift from Mariel. U.S. officials had determined that 2,746 of them were undesirable because of crimes they had committed in Cuba or in this country.

Under an agreement with the government of Fidel Castro, immigration officials have been deporting the detainees since 1988.

``We`ve been doing it regularly for a number of months,`` Jervis said.

He added that he did not know when the 90 detainees still in Alabama would be deported.